


King of Swords

by good_old_days



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, One Shot, Pre-Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-30
Updated: 2019-01-30
Packaged: 2019-10-19 13:04:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17601899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/good_old_days/pseuds/good_old_days
Summary: “King of Swords, reversed. A dark-haired man. Forceful. Intelligent. Meticulous. But selfish, quick to anger. Persuasive, some might say manipulative. Some might say a tyrant.”Set before Series 1, on the last night before Tommy, Arthur, and John go to France. Tommy has no interest in looking at his future, but he can't close his eyes.





	King of Swords

**Author's Note:**

> This one-off idea has been rattling around in my head for a little while now and I finally took the time to flesh it out. Full disclaimer: I know nothing about Tarot beyond some casual googling, so please excuse any inaccuracies.

            On the night before they ship out to France, Tommy and his brothers make their way from Small Heath to a gypsy camp that’s sprung up on the banks of a slow-moving river outside the city. Arthur has heard that there will be a party—with women, dancing, drinking, all the things they won’t have in France—and convinces them to go. They rattle over the rough city streets, shoulders jostling in Arthur’s firetrap car, a rusty thing that’s little more than a precarious collection of bolts and sheet metal, held together in some places by baling twine taken from their Uncle Charlie’s stable.

            The night is hot, the late summer air so dense and still that even the nocturnal birds seem hushed, but they hear voices and music as they get close to the riverbanks. Scattered, glowing bonfires flicker within a cluster of trees, throwing shadows on the dark shapes of wagons. Smells of smoke, grilling meat, and the earthy musk of horses dredge up memories of childhood days spent in places like this, on the rare occasions they were set free from the cramped house on Watery Lane.

            Tommy isn’t much in the mood for a party, mind tumbling with worries about Greta, Ada and Finn left at home with their sorry excuse for a father, how he’ll protect his brothers when they get to the front. Arthur too rash for his own good, John with little ones at home. He lights a cigarette as they leave the car, splitting off from his brothers in hopes of a quiet corner and strong drink.

            He finds the two easily enough—a half-splintered log and a tin cup of cheap whiskey that will seem like impossible luxuries when he thinks back to this night, lying awake in the cold, damp, impenetrable darkness of the tunnels. This is all he wants from the evening; a quiet place to think, with the sound of the river and the swell of laughter from the party around him. He’ll make his brothers happy, not complain when they inevitably want to stay later and later. And then tomorrow they’ll shoulder their bags together, get on the train together, and look across the iron-grey water of the Channel together toward France.     

            That’s all, he thinks, but of course that’s not all. Arthur slings an arm around his shoulders when he emerges from his corner to pour another cup of whiskey. His brother is drunk already, hair wilting across his forehead and the piney sweetness of gin on his breath.

            “One of them Lee girls says there’s a woman readin’ cards in the far wagon,” he says, voice slightly slurred, pointing through the trees indiscriminately. “Why don't you go get them read instead of sittin’ here with that face on ya?”

            “I don’t believe in that shit, Arthur.”

            Tommy takes another sip of whiskey, just wanting to get back to his quiet corner and his thoughts.

            “Who the fuck does? That ain’t my point—you gotta distract yerself, Tom. Find a girl, ‘ave another fuckin’ drink, something. Don’t just sit in the goddamn dark all night, eh?”

            Tommy should shrug off his brother’s arm, say that he _wants_ to sit in the dark all night, thanks very fucking much. He doesn’t hold any stock in this gypsy shit—curses and cards and pacts sealed with bloody palms. But he lets Arthur drag him through the camp, over uneven ground, through clusters of men and women laughing, until his toes bump the bottom stair of a small caravan.

            “Go on.”

            Arthur claps him too hard on the back and wanders off, though not before snatching the cup of whiskey from his hand. Tommy sighs and puts a foot on the next step.

            He expects the typical old crone who plies this kind of trade. Sun-wizened skin, wiry grey hair, about seventy-five too many necklaces covered in cheap wooden beads and talismans. Instead, he finds a young woman sitting quietly in the glow of a guttering lamp. A long, heavy braid of black hair and eyes to match; they glisten like oil when she looks up at him.

            “Come for your cards?”

            Tommy nods, watching as she shifts the deck between willowy fingers. She’s slight as a shadow, a delicate face and fine-boned shoulders framed in the neckline of a white cotton dress. The caravan is a little stuffy, rich with the scents of cinnamon and sandalwood and coffee, which he accepts when she offers it to him in a tiny cup of chipped bone china. She gestures for him to sit and slides the deck across the table between them.

            “Shuffle them.” The cards are warm from her touch. “What’s your name?”

            “Tommy.”

            She doesn’t give hers in reply, just takes the cards back once he’s straightened them into a stack. Their fingers brush over the top of the deck and she holds his eyes before pulling away.

            “What question do you have for the cards?”

            Tommy huffs out a breath. Most men in his position would ask about the war, but he knows the possible outcomes. He’ll come back alive, dead, or alive but wishing he was dead.

            “I don’t have one. My brother talked me into this. Maybe I’m just wasting your fucking time, I don’t even think it’s real.”

            If she’s offended, she doesn’t show it. Her lips curve into a smile.

            “Doubting Thomas, how apt.” She draws three cards from the top of the deck, lays them face down in a line between them. “It’s all right if you don’t believe it now.”

            Tommy can still feel the ghost of her fingers on his. The coffee makes him hot, edgy, a sheen of sweat starting in the open collar of his shirt. She taps the cards, one at a time, with her fingertip. An enormous ring with a blood red stone glistens on her index finger.

            “Past, present, future.”

            She flips the first card.

            “Five of Pentacles.” Tommy looks down at the card. Two figures, one on crutches, mired in snow outside a glowing church window. “Past. Ill luck, lacking, debt.”

            This is fucking stupid, Tommy decides. Platitudes so general that anyone could find what they were looking for. They’re in a fucking gypsy camp outside Small Heath, of course everyone here was fucking poor at some point in the past. Arthur and his idiot ideas, wasting his last night at home on this. He should go, but he can’t help being beguiled by the nameless woman. A voice like velvet, a face all angles playing in the lamplight. When will he see a beautiful woman again?

            She flips the second card.

            “King of Swords, reversed.” A glance up at him, a private sort of smile. “Present. A dark-haired man. Forceful. Intelligent. Meticulous. But selfish, quick to anger. Persuasive, some might say manipulative. Some might say a tyrant.”

            Tommy hasn't come here to be insulted. A tyrant? What the fuck does she think he's going to rule over in Small Heath? A bunch of soot-covered factories, broken cobblestones, and dirty pubs? Is she putting on airs to make fun of him, or does she actually believe this? He pushes back his chair and she lays a hand over his on the table.

            “Stay. Hear the last one.”     

            She flips the final card.

            “The Hanged Man.”

            Well, _that’s_ fucking promising for a man going off to war in the morning. Tommy curses Arthur again in his head. Just what he fucking needs right now, a gypsy girl showing him a fucking picture of a dead man.

            “Future,” she says, cutting through his thoughts. “Change and reversal. Betrayal and sacrifice. Rebirth.”

            She leaves her fingertips on the card and Tommy looks between them at the face of the man drawn there, closed eyes represented by simple lines. They're silent, listening to the increasingly raucous sounds of the party outside. Tommy wonders when he’ll hear laughter again. When he’ll hear wind in summer leaves. When he’ll hear a river.

            “Will you come back another night and bring a question?” she asks, restacking the cards and setting them aside.           

            “I go to France tomorrow,” he replies flatly.

            She regards him for a long moment, then stands wordlessly and pulls the starchy cotton dress up and off. She’s wearing nothing under it, her body pale and slim in the lantern’s light. When she extends a hand to him, he comes around the table and takes it.

            They don’t speak as he fucks her on the tiny bed at the back of the caravan. Their bodies are slick with sweat, the hot night air like a blanket over them. His breath catches in his lungs when he comes, face buried in the black silk of her hair. Afterward, they sit on the edge of the mattress as she brushes out the tangles with a tortoiseshell comb, the strands spilling like liquid over her bare breasts.

            “What do the cards mean, all together?” Tommy asks in spite of himself. In spite of the fact that he doesn’t believe in them.

            She looks up at him, dark eyes like wells.

            “The meaning changes depending on the question you’re asking. If you’re asking what this life will bring you…” She pauses as he begins to dress, doing up the buttons of his trousers, sliding his braces over his shoulders. “All together, they’re power, success, a climb that's bound up in a lack of stillness. A search for something, but the cards don’t tell me what it is.”

            “Do they tell you if I make it home?”

            The question he’d promised himself he wouldn’t ask. She shakes her head slowly, studying him through the hair that falls across her face.

            “If you wanted that answer, you should have asked that question. I’m sorry.”

            Tommy finds Arthur and John outside and shoves them into the car. He doesn’t talk on the ride home. That night he dreams of the woman’s face with the Hanged Man’s dead, closed eyes.

           

            Even though he doesn’t take stock in gypsy shit—never has, never will—Tommy does search for that thing, that one thing, forever unseen and just beyond the grasp of his fingertips. He crawls up through earth and barbed wire, wiping mud and blood away from his eyes to try and see it. He searches in the beds of countless women, in the filmy smoke of an opium pipe, in the face of his son, in a grave dug for his brother that’s fresh and raw as a wound in the soil. He searches behind the walls of Watery Lane when the picks ring in his ears, in the shadowy rooms of his empty country house, in the venerated halls of Parliament. He searches in stacks of pound notes, in bottles of gin, in lines of cocaine, in handfuls of bullets as he slots them into their chambers.

            He searches for the black-haired woman, riding along marshy riverbanks whenever he hears there’s a camp nearby. He thinks that if he can just find her, make her turn the cards again, he’ll know what he’s looking for.

            He searches until the day when he runs out of hours. His room in the country house—the room where he will die, he knows that now—is silent; the nurse has propped him up on pillows so he can look out at his racehorses in the rolling fields beyond his windows. He’s found everything else along the way, hasn’t he? More money than he could ever spend, more power than he could ever imagine.

            His children file in quietly. One blond, one dark, both with his startling eyes. His son clears his throat.

            “How do you feel, Dad?”

            “Restless,” Tommy says.

            He closes his eyes, picturing a card held in a young woman’s smooth fingers, about to turn.


End file.
